I've gone down the old-school 1980s' hi-fi system route for my CD and vinyl thrills, and you should too

Carefully combining various hi-fi components is the best way to enjoy your music collection. Picture: Scott Reid

It’s time to rewind to the big-speaker halcyon days of high fidelity, and you don’t need to spend a small fortune.

If you happen to be listening to some music as you read this then I suspect you are doing so via some new-fangled smart speaker. Or maybe through a pair of flashy headphones. Or those tinny-sounding, built-in laptop transducers.

What you’re much less likely to be doing is bopping to your favourite tunes on a dedicated hi-fi system. The sort of kit that back in the day might result from hours of thumbing through the audio mags in Menzies or Smiths, weekends spent auditioning various combinations of record players, amplifiers and speakers, and many more, often frustrating, hours attempting to hook all those shiny new boxes together.

But that was then. An era that peaked with the glory days of high-fidelity around the late 1970s/early 80s. Then along came the “midi” system, with its compact convenience and no-brainer connectivity, followed by even titchier, and even thinner sounding, micro systems, which mutated into iPod docking stations/speakers until we arrive at these present, rather depressing, times.

My mindset and audio rig would appear, at first sight, to be stuck in those halcyon hi-fi days. Yet, and I would argue this point vigorously, my musical tastes are extremely eclectic, with a CD and vinyl collection that spans most things from Abba to ZZ Top. There’s even the odd bit of Taylor Swift in there, to stay contemporary - and because she actually bangs out some decent ditties.

Though the mass of black boxes, yard upon yard of colourful cabling and waist-high speakers may look like a throwback to the 80s, nothing in my set-up dates back more than a few years (apart from a much cherished Technics cassette deck), thanks to upgraditis - a well-known and wallet-draining audiophile affliction.

In recent times we have seen a vinyl resurgence and there are growing signs of a CD revival, so clearly people still value the physical. The quality of music streaming services has improved greatly and it’s now possible to squirt songs into your home at studio-quality resolution. Which makes the death of the traditional hi-fi system all the more perplexing. You can drop the cost of a decent family car on one (guilty as charged), but you don’t have to. Nor do you need that many black boxes, or towering loudspeakers – a decent CD player, amplifier (many now incorporate streaming and Bluetooth support) and some compact bookshelf speakers should suffice. For about the same price as a big flat-screen telly you can treat your ears to what they deserve.

My guide to everything you need to know about putting together the best record-playing system from £200

Scott Reid is a business journalist at The Scotsman and previously worked in the hi-fi industry from 1982 to 1997